It could be an old lookout used by pirates, or a wooden model of a rocket, or even an elaborate weather predictor. But instead, this tower on Sugar Loaf Key, near Key West, is a bat tower.

It seems that the inhabitants of Sugar Loaf were fed up with the voracious mosquitoes that plagued them each year. So they built several such bat towers and filled them with hungry bats. The theory was that the bats would fly out each night from the towers, feed on the pesky mosquitoes, and then return to the towers each morning to rest up for the day.

So much for good ideas. On the first night, the bats took off in search of supper -- and never returned. Some local residents maintain that the mosquitoes ganged up on the unsuspecting bats and devoured them.

Occasional Key West resident Thomas McGuane writes about a bat tower in his 1971 novel The Bushwhacked Piano. There is a funny incident when an entrepreneur paints the bats a day-glo orange so his bused-in sightseers can see them eating up the bugs.